This feature debut by music-video director Michel Gondry is a lark. Working from a script by Being John Malkovich scribe Charlie Kaufman, the film delivers zany humor mixed with an anything-goes mentality. Patricia Arquette stars as a woman so hairy that she lives in the wilderness until she decides it’s time to meet a man. At that point she goes to the city and gets together with an anal retentive scientist, played by Tim Robbins, who is teaching table manners to lab mice, but he then moves up to trying to domesticate a feral man (Rhys Ifans — looking like the guy who took a vow of silence in The Life of Brian). While not as smart as Being John Malkovich, which was a brilliant and incisive satire on fame and celebrity issues, Human Nature does manage to be just as fun.
Human Nature
***published January 22, 2002